Clearly, I have a tendency to get excited and want to share whenever the data hits peaks -- it looks like my post a year ago happened at a local maximum, with the 3-month average price peeking over $100k for just a single month. This time, it's the 6-month average price up over $100k for the first time since 2008 (just barely as of August, more solidly by September). Again, the 3-month average peaked even higher, at $117k in June, but summer prices didn't fall off nearly as quickly this time, allowing the 6-month average to move $12,000 higher than its peak from a year ago.

Full data link at the bottom of the post, and also includes moving averages of sales volume and days on market. (6-month average sales volume is also at its highest in 2 years.)

Mark asked whether street trees have economic development benefits, on top of the obvious quality of life benefits, and Teresa pointed to a round-up by the Arbor Day Foundation; I decided to go a little further and dig up some primary sources. Copied over here for my own future reference, plus just a little bit of math based on the first source:

$50k median taxable value in Ypsilanti * 3% increase from street trees * 33.67 mills for all local property taxes = $50.51 / year tax revenue increase due to each street tree added to an Ypsilanti home that doesn't have one.

I'm going to make a suggestion that sounds absurd on its face, in Ypsilanti's current heated battle over cutting costs vs. raising taxes: the city should hand out $10,000 cash grants to people who purchase, fix up, and occupy vacant and foreclosed homes. Why? Because it's a net fiscal gain for the city. (Obviously, this should be treated as a starting point for discussion, rather than a fine-tuned proposal.)

Foreclosure activity, as we expect, is a downward force on home values, because the bank-owned homes dumped on the market soak up buyers. Over the last few years, from city assessing records, we can see that bank sales in the city go for half or a third the price of private sales:

With average MLS sale prices bumping along at $80,000 during that entire two year period, we can see that it was the bank sales dragging down the price. Fewer foreclosures means fewer bank-owned homes glutting the market, meaning prices can start recovering. Fortunately, Ypsi (the city, at least) is on the right side of that curve.

Thanks to Dale, I'm suddenly aware of the National Historical Geographic Information System, from the University of Minnesota. NHGIS hosts census data back to 1790! (An admission of mindlessness: I pulled up 1790 as a test and for a moment thought they only had partial census data, since Michigan wasn't listed. D'oh.)

Now I just need to restrain myself to looking up only the data I actually need, and not geeking out into semirandom data dumps.